Music News
Estonia’s Singing Revolution
Estonia’s exceptional choral-music culture has been featured often in Classical Voice, whether it’s when the San Francisco Girls Chorus visited the country’s National Song Festival or the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir performed in St. Ignatius Church and Herbst Theatre. The topic also comes up whenever Arvo Pärt is involved, and on many other occasions.
The news this week is the arrival of the film The Singing Revolution, which puts all that in context. Coming to the Landmark Lumiere Theater on May 2 is a documentary about the astonishing contemporary history of Estonia — which was ravaged by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in turn, and lost tens of thousands to execution or deportation to Siberia. Through it all, says the film by James and Maureen Castle Tusty, the nation remained unified through the Laulupidu, the annual song festival begun in 1869, and choral singing in general.
It is the sight and sound of 30,000 people singing at the festival that frames history. The climactic moment follows in 1969, when the entire festival sings an Estonian song, in nonviolent resistance to the Soviet prohibition. In 1991, resistance went beyond singing, when Estonia declared its independence, even as the Soviet President Gorbachev was under arrest in Moscow by the party faithful, as the champion of glasnost awaited liberation by Russian Federation President Yeltsin.
Music lovers may appreciate choral performances in the film more. But witnessing history in terms of the song festival, and extraordinary scenes — such as a sea of Estonians parting for the peaceful exit of thousands of ethnic Russians, who had attempted to abort the independence movement — make The Singing Revolution a highly recommended film.
At the Laulupidu song festival
More Music-and-History, With the Akademie
Marking the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, the German Consul and Bay Area veterans of the operation that saved West Berlin from Soviet encroachment are presenting three joint performances by musicians of the German National Youth Orchestra and the Berkeley Symphony. Directed by Berkeley Symphony and Bavarian State Opera Music Director Kent Nagano and violinist Stuart Canin, the musicians forming the Berkeley Akademie Ensemble will perform Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Symphony in C Major, H. 659; Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète; and Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade, K. 320.
The concert will be given on May 1, at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, and tickets are available from the Berkeley Symphony. On May 2, the program will be repeated at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco. Underwritten with the help of the German government, the May 2 concert offers tickets for $25.
The Airlift in 1948
Condemi: From Merola to the Top
One of the relatively few nonsinging Merola program participants, Jose Maria Condemi was an apprentice stage director with the San Francisco Opera Center from 1999 to 2000. Look at him now: His Opera San José production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is currently running at the California Theatre; he will direct Tristan und Isolde at Lyric Opera Chicago (the production features Merola alumna Deborah Voigt and Clifton Forbis); he will create a new production of Verdi’s Ernani in Chicago, and of Verdi’s Il Trovatore for the Seattle Opera, as well as the premiere of Don Davis’ River of Blood for the Florentine Opera.
One of the busiest director/designers in the business, Condemi is also producing Don Pasquale for the Lake George Opera and Faust for Opera Grand Rapids, while continuing to work with young artists as a guest lecturer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the National Theater in Tokyo.
Jose Maria Condemi
Domingo Anniversary Concert in Movie Theaters
Plácido Domingo’s 40th anniversary gala concert, which took place at the Los Angeles Opera last weekend, will be shown in 22 Landmark
Theaters around the country at 2 p.m. PST, Sunday, May 11. The concert features arias and duets by Domingo and soprano Patricia Racette. The LA Opera Orchestra is conducted by the company’s music director, James Conlon.
Shall We Dance … for Free?
While the San Francisco Ballet is celebrating its 75th anniversary with a bold New Works Festival, beginning this week, Bay Area National Dance Week, the nation’s largest such project, is marking its 10th year with more than 300 performances, April 25 – May 4.
Expect a plethora of free classes, performances, rehearsals, lecture demonstrations, and studio open houses in the area for the occasion. Besides ballet and modern dance, the event also features fire dance (convenient during the current cold snap), hula, Argentine tango, classical Indian, jazz, hip-hop, Samba, classical Chinese, belly dance, aerial dance, West African, and contact improvisation. Never mind participating, simply listing this is tiring enough.
Try Kathak dancing with the Chitresh Das Dance Company
Photo by Sri Kumar
“We weren’t the first to celebrate National Dance Week, but certainly we were the first to do so region-wide, and with such flair and a diverse, inclusive array of dance forms,” says Barbara Kaplan, one of the BANDW founding organizers.
The tagline ‘All Dance, All Free, All Week’ captures the heart and strength of this amazing event. The intention is to make dance in all its forms accessible to the general public. Anyone and everyone can participate. There is a great tradition of community arts activism in the Bay Area — from the WPA to the formation of the Neighborhood Arts Program 40 years ago, and BANDW continues in that tradition to engage, serve, and celebrate the arts and cultures we hold so dear to our hearts.
The event kicks off, at noon on Friday, April 25, in Union Square, with a public conga line, followed by a bevy of performances, from Hot Pink Feathers and the Blue Bone Express to Alseny Soumah and Lahydi (from Guinea, West Africa), and the hip hop classic Funkanometry.
On Saturday, from noon to 5 p.m., the Mark Foehringer Dance Project presents 30 local dance companies — including Stephen Pelton Dance Theater, Company C Contemporary Ballet, the S.F. Conservatory of Dance, LINES Ballet School — along with a Young Choreographers Festival.
Mark Foehringer, Duettos
Photo by Marty Sohl
Pan-Asian Music at Stanford
The annual Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival, April 20 — May 4, focuses on Chinese music and dance in a series of concerts, film screenings, and lectures. Opening the series is a new kunqu opera performed by Qian Yi and Wu Hsing-Kuo, two of the world’s most famous Chinese opera stars. The festival explores a variety of traditions and styles in performances by contemporary dancer Jin Xing; as well as the U.S. debut of her Jin Xing Dance Theater, with Carmina Burana, the Xianghua Buddhist ceremony group from southern China, erhu master Wang Guo-Tong, the Jiaotong University Chorus, and Stanford’s own musicians.
Xianghua Buddhist Ceremony Group
Crowden at 25
Berkeley’s Crowden Music Center will celebrate its 25th anniversary with a concert at Hertz Hall on May 24, featuring David Abel, George Cleve, Deirdre Cooper, Karla Donehew, Bonnie Hampton, Paul Hersh, Nathan Olson, Benjamin Simon, Julie Steinberg, and the Crowden School Orchestra. Some 100 musicians sharing the stage during the concert represent about four times the entire school’s initial population of 13 students, educators, and participating parents (such as the composer John Adams).
Crowden Executive Director Doris Fukawa says the purpose of the event is “to give a public concert that would bring together remarkable musicians from all stages of our history. Performers, alumni, and friends are coming from all over—and outside of—the country to share this experience.”
The program includes Bloch’s Concerto Grosso No. 2, Brahms’ Sonata No.1 in G Major, Op. 78; Schubert’s Quintet in C Major, D. 956; and Bach’s Orchestral Suite,No. 3. Young Crowden musicians will take the stage to perform a new work by alumnus Matthew Cmiel, commissioned by Crowden for the occasion. Tickets are $10-$25.
George Cleve to lead Crowden Schools anniversary concert
All-English Program from Parnassus
Led by Music Director Stephen Paulson, Symphony Parnassus is giving an all-English program at Herbst Theatre on April 27 at 3 p.m. The program includes Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Romance for Bassoon and Orchestra, Op. 62. Paulson, who is also principal bassoonist with the San Francisco Symphony, will perform the solo part while leading the orchestra. The program concludes with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5 in D Major.
Stephen Paulson
The Geometry of Music
The connection between music and mathematics has fascinated scholars for centuries. More than 2,000 years ago, Pythagoras reportedly discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios. The so-called musica universalis, or “music of the spheres,” emerged in the Middle Ages as the philosophical idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies — the sun, moon, and planets — could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.
Now, three music professors — Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University, and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University — have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its fabric.
Writing in the April 18 issue of Science, the trio has outlined a method called “geometrical music theory” that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. They take sequences of notes — such as chords, rhythms, and scales — and categorize them so they can be grouped into “families.” They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces (in much the same way that paired “x” and “y” coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane).
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.